Quotes from Isaac Asimov

But people who are capable of thinking clearly are in a minority, of course.

When one's home has a really excellent computer capable of reaching other computers anywhere in the Galaxy, one scarcely needs to budge, you know.

Often, one compensates by playing an instrument, or going hiking, or joining some club. In other words, one creates a new type of society, when not working, in which one can feel more at home.

Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth.

Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past—never on yourselves.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone.

But what could I want with riches? The true wealth is the love of one's people.

For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want – but an end?

Psychohistory was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations. The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically.

Men identified themselves with the Century with which they were associated professionally. Its battles, all too often, became their own battles.

It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!

La forma más fácil de solucionar un problema es negar su existencia.

Could he tell her any of this? Of course not. Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man.

Every man's position on Earth is restricted to the distance he can walk.' -- The Last Trump

You can't maintain discipline that way." Mallow said icily, "I can. There's no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I'll have it in the face of death, or it's useless.

That was the trouble with the Outside. One teetered forever between unpleasant alternatives.

There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, spirits. Methyl alcohol, they called wood spirit; ethyl alcohol, wine spirit. Even today, alcoholic beverages are frequently referred to as spirits. (Modern Arabs, from whose language the word alcohol was taken, call ethyl alcohol spirit from the English. This is a queer exchange.)

A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human being's ultimate good after all.

La violence est le dernier refuge de l'incompétence.

There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't three meanings.

Human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn't matter how long a machine lasts, but they cannot tolerate an immortal human being since their own mortality is endurable only so long as it is universal.

If a robot can be manipulated into doing harm to a man, it means only that we must extend the powers of the positronic brain. One might say we ought to make the human better. That is impossible, so we will make the robot more foolproof.

Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another. Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with? And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims.